36 hour days

So I’ve been having a lot of trouble with sleep lately. It seems I spend most of my days just trying to get on a sleep schedule. I’ve been staying up late some nights, falling asleep in the middle of the day other times, staying up for multiple nights at a time. Yep, overall my sleep schedule is fucked up.

So what would be the best solution to this little dilemma?

Actually fall asleep at a decent time?

No. That’s far too obvious and pragmatic.

No. The best solution is to convince others to follow a completely new schedule that fits better with my way of working.

I have come up with a plan that will solve many problems of sleep disorders, especially insomnia. Also, it would increase our productivity and give us more time for the things we love.
And what is this amazing time saving idea? Simple. It’s the 36 hour day.

Think about it. How much time is wasted getting up or going to sleep. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if that time happened less often? With a 36 hour day, you fall to sleep 2/3 as many times as you would in the same time with a 24 hour day.

The secret is in the scheduling. A normal day lasts 16 hours and has 8 hours of sleep. The trouble is most people get far less than 8 hours. The reason for this is they don’t feel tired when they should be sleeping. They toss and turn for hours until they finally doze off. For many, 8 hours isn’t enough. They need more. How many people hit the snooze alarm multiple times everyday even to the point where they end up late for their engagements? Too many to count.
The 36 hour day solves both of these problems. It’s easier to sleep when you’ve been up longer. On the 36 hour day, you get 24 hours of wake time instead of the normal 16. Also, you get twelve hours of sleep every night instead of the minuscule eight hours we get on the 24 hour day. 12 hours is enough to let anyone feel rested and 24 hours of wake time is just enough that sleeping is easy. It’s the perfect length for the day.

What are the benefits to this amazing plan?

I’m glad you asked. Think about it. On this schedule, you’ll have more time to do the things you want to do. Say it takes me an hour to fall asleep and thirty minutes to wake up. That’s an hour and a half everyday when I’m doing nothing. Expand the day to 36 hours. Now it’ll still take me that hour to fall asleep (even less, actually), and the thirty minutes to wake up (probably less, since I’m more rested.) That means that over the course of 72 hours, I will have added an hour and a half extra time to my schedule; time that could be spent doing productive things I just couldn’t do on a twenty-four hour day, and those hours and a halves add up. Over the course of a lifetime you will have had years of extra time to live that you wouldn’t have on the twenty-four hour day. You’ll feel better about yourself, more rested, confident and secure, just because you have that extra time to do what you need to do.

Isn’t it hard to stay up 24 hours at a time?

No. In fact it’s rather easy. As a college student I’ve stayed awake up to 48 hours at a time so that I could get work done. Staying up twenty-four hours at a time is no harder than running on five hours of sleep a night, which is what most Americans do anyway because either they can’t fall asleep, or they have too much work to let them sleep. Now you can get your work done and have a full night’s rest.

But we are diurnal. We need to follow the sun cycle.

That’s not true. I myself am naturally nocturnal. If I had my way I’d stay up at night and sleep during the afternoon, but I can’t because society won’t allow it. We only follow the sun cycle because that was the best way to keep time when we didn’t have watches. Noone keeps track of time by the sun anymore. There are clocks everywhere. We don’t need it. If you like being out in the sun, then on a 36 hour day, you are guaranteed to have sunlight at some point during the day, unless you live on the north or south pole.

Wouldn’t we have to learn a whole new way of keeping time?

Why are you asking that? It’s ideas like these that keep America from switching to the metric system. Look it’s not that hard. Don’t try to think of the system in terms of the old way of thinking. Just learn the new way. It’s a lot easier and you aren’t confusing kids by having them remember all those weird conversions. How many yards are there in a mile? Noone knows, but I can tell you how many meters are in a kilometer in a second. It’s easy to learn a new system, especially when it makes sense. Two meters is the average height. That’s easy. I can hold up an accurate centimeter, but I can’t for the life of me hold up an accurate inch. The point is, if a system is developed that makes sense, we will have no trouble learning it.

But our system works just fine.

No it doesn’t. Seven days in a week? Why seven? A week doesn’t divide evenly into a month. A week doesn’t divide evenly into a year. How many days are in a month? You don’t know because it changes from month to month. We could easily develop a system that’s much more regular. We could have a week that divides evenly into a month. We could have a series of months with the same number of days. Our system is not perfect, and it’s getting less and less accurate as time goes by.

What are some of the benefits to society?

We can have someone awake at every point of the day. If we decide to stagger the days, then society could be at work all the time. Also with this system, day and night shift would be meaningless. Both would be equally attractive so you wouldn’t have to force different shifts on people that don’t want them, or do that weird rotation thing some companies do. Just have group A and group B. Problem solved. On top of that, there’s a twelve hour overlap every day between “day” and “night.” People on different schedules still have plenty of time to converse, so if your spouse is opposite you, it won’t be like you never see them, as opposed to the 24 hour day when having different schedules would clash.

I could go on, but I think I’ll stop here. Remember 36 hour day for a better America.

Someone on the old blog asked me to come up with a time-keeping system, so here it is.

365*4 = 1460 + 1 = 1461 (accounting for leap year)

1461/1.5 = 974 which when divided by four is 243.5.

So there are 243.5 days in a year with 36 hour days (give or take). If you were to expand the hour out by a little bit there would be 240. The day would change by so little it won’t have any effect on us.

While we’re changing the length of time in an hour, let’s expand it a little more so we have thirty hours in a day.

Now with 240 days in a year, we can divide a year into four seasons of 60 days. Seasons are what show the passage of time. However, if you still want twelve months, each month could be twenty days, giving us three months a season.

Next we’ll make the week five days long (with one weekend) giving us four weeks a month.
This makes the total conversion 60 seconds a minute 60 minutes an hour 30 hours a day 5 days a week 4 weeks a month 3 months a season and 4 seasons a year.

There you go. A perfectly balanced time system.